Apple to announce OS 10.7 (probably) on October 20
engadget.com
engadget.com
In 2009, Apple released Snow Leopard, whose emphasis on optimization and subtle improvement seemed to signal the same kind of state for the operating system as the addiiton of a camera signaled for the Nano.
I think it's safe to say that what comes next will be fairly big.
I have a suspicion that among other things, 10.7 will introduce some new conventions to the basic problems of window management (though I might be a little biased). Apple has been at the forefront of dealing with it ever since Exposé debuted with 10.3, but in the years since the iPhone, iOS has thrown this problem into sharp relief. Part of me hopes they might even announce something that bears a resemblance to 10/GUI's linear window management -- I've unfortunately proven I can't really do much with the concept myself so far.
For anyone not sure why mortenjock is biased, I recommend viewing his concept video 10GUI http://10gui.com/video/
The recent Magic Trackpad would tend to support your ideas here.
Didn't they interview you for a job at one point? Did they indicate if they were experimenting with new desktop UI frameworks?
My experience with the Apple recruitment process didn't tell me much about the company's plans for the desktop (I didn't get far enough to sign an NDA), but I did learn something important: Their interaction designers, the concept guys whose explorations eventually filter down into shipping products... are also developers. Apple hires the best of both worlds, idea people who don't even stop to sketch ideas out on paper but head straight to XCode and an NSWindow. That's literally their process.
The best thing that came of it was that it inspired me to set out to learn Objective-C and Cocoa. I'm not as far with it as I'd like to be yet, but it's opened my eyes to the possibilities of becoming a designer/developer. Even if, in the future, I'm still the archetypal designer looking for a technical co-founder, hopefully I'll be good enough that I can at least carry my own weight.
FWIW, I'd love it if Apple did something like 10/GUI.
My feeling is that this unlikely because it doesn't seem like they've had enough time or resources to dedicate to something big. It's been one year since the release of Snow Leopard and since that year they've released an OS on a new hardware platform and a heavily updated iOS for the iPhone.
I think it's far more likely that this is an incremental release focused on user concerns with perhaps some other new software.
Touch. Deep integration with touch. As you see with the release of the Magic Trackpad, Apple is retiring the traditional mouse paradigm and moving on to versatile and complex gestures to aid in window management. Four finger swipe for expose and show desktop has been godsend for productivity, as has three fingers up and down for switching between h/m files in xcode. Let's not forget swipe to go back and forth in browsers, pinch to zoom, rotation, etc... None of which is possible with the standard mouse.
And peruse through Apple's touch gesture patent library and you will see that they haven't implemented a fraction of what they have patents to. You have neat stuff like three finger pinch (possible to close/hide a window, save), non-adjacent finger scroll (ex. thumb and ring finger, note that Magic Trackpad is big enough for this one, but existing options on MBP are not), and several others involving rotation and unconventional finger combos. Expect for these gestures to be baked deeply into the new iMovie, iPhoto, and iTunes. Seriously, can you imagine alternate paradigms for simply grabbing video from a bin once you account for different numbers of fingers involved in the drag?
A preview of Lion with these features will allow them to sell the next generation MBP with a new, much larger trackpad to accommodate the new focus on touch and touch gestures. If Apple scores a hit with this new focus on touch, it will be another competitive headache for thin, underpowered clients that serve up web content and can't handle advanced video and photo editing, not to mention lack large surface areas for touch gesturing.
What's in it for Apple:
If you think about this from a competitive standpoint, most of Apple's competitors want to lift computing into the cloud--Google with Chrome OS, HP with WebOS, and even MSFT with Ballmer's pronouncements of "cloud speed". Apple's strategy, and profits, are vested in adding weights to computing to take advantage of powerful, local, GPU and CPU intensive tasks, thus slowing, or even reversing the shift towards browsers and web applications, in keeping us grounded in powerful, local machines. If Apple finally figures out a way to get your mom editing video with powerful and intuitive new touch gestures, how is a web application going to respond to this from the confines of a browser? How is Microsoft going to coordinate with clone makers to agree on standard sizes and performance of computationally complex multi-touch trackpads? Touch and media editing all the way.
Maybe something MacRuby related? Maybe making it a first class language?
- I remember when the Dock was a new idea; will there be a similar revelation in task management?
- The "Spaces" feature could use some work to bring it up to par with similar functionality in Ubuntu.
- Complete the transition to 64-bit for every single Apple sub-system|program.
- Tighter integration/control of external stuff: AppleTV, Airport Express, etc.
Not that I have any hope of seeing this, but I would extend it to iPhones, iPad, etc. for things like sharing clipboards, using the computer's mic/audio to pick up the phone, direct access to the iPhone's camera from the desktop... basically make the relationship between the computers and devices more symbiotic.
Apple has presumably learned much from their iOS work that will inform their thinking about how people want to interact with a device. I don't think we'll see a touch-the-screen interface, but we might see an interface that is less file/application oriented and more task oriented. It won't be a replacement, but it might be a new direction.
Oh, and some gradients and textures will be slightly different and 10,000 blogs posts will be written about that.
God, they fubared that. I can't count the number of times my wife complained about Snow Leopard's constant WIFI problems. It's sad when my iPhone has better connectivity then her MBP.
I also complain to my wife that she needs to stop going on and offline all the time. She doesn't appreciate that. =)
Edit: For those that think no problem exists: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/04/ipad-wifi/
We also considered the location of the router, but both the iPad and MBP suffer the problem even if they are in the same room as the router.
We also don't experience the problem on a netbook we have that runs both Linux and Win7. However, we don't use it that often, but it's never had the problem whenever we did use it.
It could simply be a hardware issue, but as I said, we aren't the only ones having this problem.
Has anyone had such problems and then everything magically worked when switching to an apple airport express or airport extreme?
A week later I was in an Apple store and a young kid walked up to an iMac and said "ooh, I bet this is a touch screen". It wasn't, of course, but it made me wonder if Apple hasn't been quietly training a generation of people to expect to be able to touch the screen. Maybe that's what the much-maligned glass displays has been about: user preparation for the inevitable day.
* iChat and Bonjour. I cannot, for the life of me, get my iMac and my wife's MBP to chat, let alone do anything else iChat says it can do. I've not found a solution. I can occasionally see the MBP on my iMac, but I cannot do anything with it.
* Make iLife make sense. Videos are stored in iPhoto, but need to be transfered to iTunes to send them to the AppleTV. But I need to create them in iMovie. iMovie is for editing movies. iPhoto is for editing pictures, but also organizing movies. Movies are also organized in iTunes. Also, plugging in a devices starts up iPhoto by default. Setting this up silently isn't easy to discover.
* System Preferences. The best way to demonstrate the complete craziness of this is to explain that to disable the Remote Control, you need to go to the Security panel. I'm not even going to mention that fact that certain panels literally lie to you. No, that keyboard command you say I should use doesn't actually do what you say it does.
* Window Management. Sure, their are programs you can install for this, but it should be something handled by Apple.
* Fix Safari so I can log into their support pages. I'm mean, it's evil that I need to download Firefox so I can log into their support pages. Yes, I've cleared the cache in Safari, and cookies, etc.
Apple does great on the polish, and their system sits on top of a solid foundation, but in between that, the meat, is lacking.
Sure, OSX is stable, but it's still frustrating by default.
Essentially, I find it sad that my wife and I find it easier to email each other things rather than use something like iChat or file sharing. I can't count the number of times we're both online, but one can't see the other, or neither can see.
The problem is the foundation is mostly fine. They really need to start working on making the system easy to use though. Their are a LOT of areas were the polish is gone, and all you're seeing are warts.
iLife isn't really part of OSX, even though it comes pre-installed. It usually gets a separate release on it's own so they can sell upgrades to people on older versions of OSX. The videos / iPhoto issue is annoying, but derives from the addition of videos to the iPhone. I'm not sure how they are going to handle that better.
It sounds like (based on this and a different comment) that you just don't like your Macs.
Oh, I like my Macs. I like the environment. However, it's not all roses and unicorn kisses as some make it out to be. The problem is when you want to do something remotely outside the default. Like, for instance, if you plug in your iPhone and you don't want iPhoto starting up and stealing focus, then it's a headache. Smart defaults work best, defaults that don't interrupt your workflow. Look at TimeMachine. It works without disrupting you. Awesome. It's their when you need it, but doesn't pester you. I complain, but their are also a lot of things I like.
As for the Firewall: I've tried so many things. Yes, the firewall was one thing I checked. I don't know. I spent too much time on it already that the thought of going back and spending more time is frustrating.
Go into Image Capture and change the preference to not start iPhoto when it is connected. The reason it does this by default is b/c your iPhone has a camera so everytime you connect your iPhone the 'smart default' is 'hey there are pictures, let's suck 'em down 'n back 'em up!'.
Your iChat and Safari problems are... unusual, to put it mildly. (Moreso the Safari issue, which seems to be unique to you.)
1. The Finder is going to change. What is becomes I don't know, but I think the filesystem will be further downplayed as Apple tries to take its vision of user friendliness even further. This is the possibility.
2. Window management goes away. Imagine software that didn't need its UI sorted and resized. Personally I hate even thinking about where something should rest on a screen. Given that there are tons of legacy applications out there that use windows in a variety of ways I don't see this happening. This is the dream.
-- Edit:
Graphics drivers that are on par with Windows should probably be added to the "dream" category.
I don't see that feasible or desirable. In a small format it works, but on a desktop I very often want to see multiple windows at the same time. (say, reading documentation with code, or multiple files open at once)
The recent praise full-screen applications got at the 10.7 sneak peek doesn't resonate with me, but perhaps it will with others. What I want are applications that intelligently manage screen real estate themselves. My thoughts on this are still somewhat unpolished, but what I'd really like to see is automatic management based on need and importance. Clear, standard notifications (and as few as possible), cooperation between apps when two or more run on the screen, and a clear way to navigate between them. All the while there would be no title bars or min/max/close buttons to be found.
This isn't a call for more iOS in OS X (although it seems to be going that way) so much as it is a call to acknowledge the limitations of user ability and patience. It's something I think about a lot.
Other than that, I'd like to see it continue to get faster. Booting, opening apps, etc.
Why wouldn't you just use copy/paste?
Sure OSX has the Finder and Spotlight but it's not quite as quick and convenient, in my experience.
But my big request is this: implement the TRIM command in the OS to open up the SSD choices. This is long overdue.
"We started off this article making it intentionally limited in scope as we weren't expecting, in a OS that doesn't support TRIM, to find anything all that interesting. What we found was the exact opposite: an OS that doesn't appear to be affected by SSD performance degradation [...]"
That may be true, but there isn't enough information in that article to tell. I think their other theory — that the Samsung SSD is essentially pre-degraded — is more likely to be correct.
Don't worry about trim, just get a drive that supports on-board garbage collection and dive in!
Do you press ⌘-Space to open Spotlight? I'm not sure how it can get more convenient...
With the old full-travel desktop keyboards, it's a bit awkward.
With the pre-"chiclet" laptop keyboards, where there is no significant gap between the keys and the edges are simply beveled, it's pretty easy and smooth.
I don't have a chiclet keyboard handy at the moment to test, but it probably isn't any more awkward than the full-travel keyboards.
It seems like a lot of keystrokes, I know, and you have to switch to the Finder and it only works on initial characters (e.g. LIghtroom, not LightRoom) -- but since there's no search involved it "feels" extremely fast, which is often the thing that trumps all else.
Somehow it just doesn't seem as good. Maybe it's the single keypress. Maybe it's that Start also has pinned and commonly used items on it (CMD-Space is just a box you can type in so really it's half the functionality of Win7's Start button).
I want to select "restart", go to the kitchen, get my dinner, come back, and the computer be rebooted and my applications restored the way they were before.
Also, the developer tools should include a good package manager instead of having to use Homebrew or Macports (both of which are flawed in various ways).
I actually can't think of any time I've even used restart to reset my computer's state in the past couple of years.
It would also be acceptable if Safari could just remember what tabs I had open and reopen them instead of asking me stupid questions when I run Software Update and then canceling restart when I don't answer.
I imagine there's a hundred tiny problems which make it infeasible, and it would require API changes, but damn would it be nice.
There's basically no way for the OS to do that for them, they'd each have to implement it themselves in a manner specific to the application.
I don't see much Apple is likely to do to help. They could bless a package manager as official, include it in OS X, and pay for build-boxen and for people to work on it; but you'd still need a lot of community involvement, and that's not Apple's cup o' tea.
Apple could also just make a few things easier about building nix packages: Currently the OS X linker will automagically look for libraries in /usr/lib and /usr/local/lib by default, this should become easier to turn off so that packages don't end up with hidden dependencies on stuff the user threw in /usr/local. * A lot of libraries that are extremely common on other nix aren't included in OS X, eg: readline, iconv, gettext. But many of these are GPL3, so don't count on Apple being helpful. Universal, backwards-compatible binaries are currently a PITA to build from the command-line. You need to specify the SDK, DEPLOYMENT_TARGET, and compiler separately; and then if you ended up using different SDKs for different architectures, you need to use lipo to combine the results. Some way to specify all this stuff at once, and use sensible defaults would be great: 'gcc --sdk=ppc/gcc-4.0/10.4 --sdk=x86_64/clang/10.6 ...'
More gestures for the magic trackpad.
Improved Time machine (I want all to see all previous versions of a particular file, not row through a timeline of a directory.).
Improved automation (Automator is still not natural enough, lots of clicky dragging.).
Frameworks start to encourage 3rd party applications to continuously auto-save like iOS apps.
Don't want to see but will probably see: Lots of "social" junk, like Ping for iWork or something that nobody will actually use.
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2010021113085350...
It has stupid limitations — files in use, can't put item to trash while trash is emptied. Still has only read-only support for FTP, locks up with WebDav, can't browse ZIP, etc.
Copying in Finder is much slower than with cp. On Samba drive it may need 10-20 seconds to replace 2kb file.
It handles permission errors erratically (sometimes asks for permission, sometimes fails, sometimes asks and fails anyway). UI for permission change is weak.
I could rant about Finder whole day.
For me it was quite a disappointment because one of my main beefs with finder is the atrocious performance even on modern hardware and especially when network mounts are involved. Sadly pathfinder turned out to be even slower!
I don't need zillions of buttons and special "features". First and foremost I want a lean and fast view into my files, everything else is secondary.
As much as I hate windows; up to this day the windows explorer remains the most bearable graphical file browser that I have used.
Of course, my pipe dream would be if they would release a Windows app store at the same time, with as little friction as possible for releasing apps on both platforms. I doubt that Apple would do that, but who knows.
File Vault is a poor hack. Needs logout to free disk space. You can't sudo into file-vaulted account. It makes Time Machine nearly useless: you can only restore entire home directory at once. It won't backup anything in home while you're logged in.
I installed snow leopard and reverted back to leopard just after 3 hours as I couldn't stand the new (non proportional) exposè.
Yes, I'm exposè addicted...
Like a bank that has become too big to fail, iTunes has become this massive hub that manages everything from audio and video syncing to mobile file and app management. Mobile device interaction not relating to multimedia needs to be offloaded to a renovated iSync, or better yet, Finder needs to be updated to integrate the iOS anti-filesystem. Photos, apps, app files -- all hierarchically listed with MacFUSE-like simplicity, but probably with a more context-appropriate UI than the standard Finder view.
The elegance of that solution seems too much for Apple to ignore.
I wonder if this could prompt Apple to adopt Fuse as a means of filesystem abstraction in Finder?
Support for over-the-air syncing of devices.
DLNA. I use MediaLink to stream from my MacBook Pro to the Sony PS3.
My USB scanner doesn't work when plugged into the Airport Extreme.
Basically, everything related to syncing, sharing, streaming, and networking in general should be improved.
The future of the Mac is connecting to the iPhone, iPad, AppleTV, MobileMe, and other devices.
There's already a higher-resolution 15" MBP available, would be great to see more of that.
I mean, doesn't a 30" monitor require dual-link capability to feed that resolution? A retina display on even an iPad sized screen would approach that type of resolution.
The only limitation is that producing very high DPI displays in large sizes with acceptable defect rates is extremely expensive.
I don’t even know whether that‘s currently feasible below the price of a small car or something like that. I wouldn’t expect 300+ ppi (“Retina“) screens anytime soon but resolution independence sure would be nice. (And later maybe some 200+ dpi screens.)
Windows:
1 - Click a download link
2 - Yes, I'm sure
3 - Run
4 - Next, Next, Next, Finish
5 - Delete the setup file
OS X:
1 - Click a download link
2 - Yes, I'm sure
3 - Open a finder window
4 - Open .dmg file, and it mounts
5 - Open the mounted image
6 - Run the installer (or drag it somewhere, depending on the app)
7 - Continue, Continue, Finish
8 - Unmount the image
9 - Delete the .dmg file
This is how it should work
1. User clicks download link
2. Browser downloads a standard cross-platform .zip file, decompresses in a temporary directory
3. Browser notifies OS.
4. OS looks in Info.plist for instructions on where to install, possibly mpkg for more complex installers
5. OS prompts user for permission to install and possibly run the app, or passes user over to Installer.app for complex installs
6. Temporary files are deleted
1. Click download link
2. Click "Install and Run"Ubuntu:
1 - Select package(s)
2 - Click Apply
(or use the command line to reduce to 1 step)
1 - Click a download link
2 - Do other things until the DMG opens automatically
3 - Click and drag the application into the link to /Applications right next to it
4 - Yes, I want to run this downloaded application, the first time you run it.
Deleting the .dmg is something that I don't do as part of this process, but as part of a separate garbage collection process every few weeks.
Apple got rid of disks, why not get rid of the images too?
Ok, that's one word, but you get the point. Multitouch trackpads and gestures in 10.6 are only the start.
Lion: King of OS X big cat releases -- Last 10.x?
For example, "Lions are unusually social compared to other cats,"[2] which means that MacOS X Lion could have social networking as its main feature. Just pick what you hope for the most and find a way to tie it to the critter.
I only wish they had gone with "Liger".